


Pa’lante

by linguamortua



Category: Narcos (TV), Narcos: Mexico (TV)
Genre: First Kiss, First Time, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Seduction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 14:02:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22976368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: There were a lot of good reasons to keep Pacho in Juárez for a while. Amado might just have found another one.
Relationships: Amado Carrillo Fuentes/Hélmer "Pacho" Herrera
Comments: 7
Kudos: 50





	Pa’lante

**Author's Note:**

> Professional troublemaker and demon [trillgutterbug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trill_gutterbug/pseuds/trill_gutterbug) described Amado as ‘straight, but with a Pacho-specific clause’, and it was so true and real that I felt it in my soul and had to write Amado suddenly figuring it out for himself. 
> 
> Thanks also to [indigostohelit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/pseuds/indigostohelit) for blazing a trail with this obviously canon and correct pairing.

‘Have another one.’ Amado poured a generous measure of whiskey into Pacho’s glass. Although, who was measuring? Pacho brought it delicately up to his nose and sniffed, eyes closed, as if he hadn’t been slowly drinking the same thing all afternoon.

‘Thanks.’ Pacho took a sip and stretched his arm out across the back of the wicker sofa. He looked more relaxed than when he’d arrived. So he should. Amado had been pouring good liquor and good food into him for the past twenty-four hours. He was a little anxious to get it right. The Cali boys lived nice. Lived fancy. Juárez—well, it was home to Amado, but he could respect that some people might think it was a dump.

‘Tomorrow we’ll go out to the airfield,’ Amado told him. ‘We’ve got a new way of loading the product, Pachito, packs it denser. And there’s the new warehouse.’

‘You’re a professional, man,’ said Pacho, shaking his head. ‘Look at you.’ He gave a sad little smile. Amado interpreted it as, _I’m going to miss this_. Fuck. He didn’t even have to interpret. It was obvious.

‘So are you. We’re a great team.’

‘Salud,’ Pacho said in response, and they tapped their glasses together.

The kid, Alvaro, was splashing loudly in the pool with a girl, and the staff were well out of earshot. So Amado felt just fine leaning in and telling Pacho:

‘Don’t give me those fucking sad eyes. Come on. Work with me.’

Pacho sighed.

‘It’s complicated, Amado.’

‘Nothing’s _that_ complicated.’

Pacho didn’t respond. He took another sip of his drink, rolling it around with the air of a man who knew what he was tasting.

‘Later, I’ll make you something good,’ he told Amado. ‘Something new.’

‘Something?’

‘A drink.’

‘Do I get to know what’s in it, or it is a mystery?’

‘A surprise,’ Pacho corrected him. He smiled, looking almost mischievous for a moment. ‘You’ll like it.’

Amado knew he would, because he liked everything Pacho did—everything, of course, except how he always avoided the real question at hand. Pacho made beautiful drinks, brought beautiful gifts, made Amado laugh. A strange kind of courting, Amado thought, although Pacho must have understood that it was all out of the question. Nonetheless, Pacho Herrera was a man who knew how to make people feel important, like they had got exactly what they wanted even when he was on the cusp of pulling the rug out from underneath them. What Pacho wanted: well, he took that, didn’t he? Subtly or obviously, with seduction or with violence.

The word _seduction_ floated up to the top of Amado’s conscious mind, and he pushed it back down to the depths before it could show on his face. Pacho had that effect on him sometimes. Made him feel strange. He wondered if Pacho felt the same strange things. If he did, would it make him more likely to join Amado in business, or less? Whatever the case, Amado was working on a tight timeline. In less than 48 hours, Pacho would be back on a plane home. And Amado’s second choice wasn’t going to tolerate competition. Even retired competition. There would be a price, for him and for Pacho, if he couldn’t be very, very convincing.

* * *

Amado, poring over shipment details at two in the morning, wasn’t expecting the soft tap of a glass coming to rest on the desk by his splayed left hand. He pawed at his eyes and looked over his left shoulder to see Pacho. He was dressed more casually than Amado had ever seen him: loose cotton pants and a t-shirt that Amado could immediately tell was expensive. He was heavy-lidded, but not with sleep. So the boy, Elias, had done his work.

‘Go to bed, motherfucker,’ he told Pacho amiably. ‘You don’t have to be awake.’

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ Pacho shrugged. He rested a hand on the desk and leaned over Amado’s shoulder, reading the list. He whistled. ‘Ten percent up over twelve months ago.’

‘Yeah, we absorbed one of the routes out east in February.’ Amado forced himself not to turn so that he could chase the smell of Pacho, humid, heavy, sex and aftershave.

‘Don’t you have accountants for this?’

‘Sure, but I like to keep an eye on it myself. What is this?’ Amado stuck his nose into his glass like a refuge.

‘White gin, lime, sugar.’

It was good: fresh, herbal, enlivening.

‘When you’ve dealt with all that government bullshit, come down here and be my bartender,’ Amado said. It earned him a real laugh, one of Pacho’s big, expansive chuckles.

‘I’m expensive.’

‘I’m rich, brother.’

Pacho laughed again—what a sound, thought Amado, still somewhat abstracted by weights and flights and payments—and then he crossed the room and took up residence in the leather armchair that Amado considered Pacho's. Pacho's favourite chair, for the two or three days a year he was around to sit in it. Taking his drink, Amado went to sit opposite him. The chairs were close together in a corner, a small table within arm's reach of both. It was a nook for a quiet conversation. It was the time of night for a quiet conversation, layers peeled back.

Amado's security was pushed out in a neat perimeter around the house, and his staff had left. Unlike some guys, he didn't need a fucking chef on call all night. He liked his own space, anyway. He liked being able to do whatever he wanted, talk to whoever he wanted, without an audience. He remembered once, a family dinner with Miguel Angel: Amado dropping in to hand off some manifests, the family sitting around the table. And along the back wall, two sicarios. Another at the door. Watching, listening.

Money could buy you a fair amount of loyalty and a lot of silence, but Amado still didn’t want to eat and drink and read and work and fuck with just anyone in the house. Pacho had an easier set of parameters: he was fucking half his guys. That moved the boundaries in a little, Amado figured.

‘So, when—’ Amado began. He wanted a plan. He needed one. You always had to have a plan, and a back-up plan, and three escape routes.

Pacho wrinkled his nose. ‘It’s too late for that. I told you it’s a complicated situation.’

‘Okay, okay. Fine. Okay.’ Amado rolled the gin cocktail over his tongue. He swallowed, yawned. ‘So what are you gonna do with all that money?’

‘Haven’t decided.’

‘Buy a casino,’ Amado suggested. ‘Or a fucking island.’

Pacho smiled, but politely. Okay, no talking. Amado could take a hint.

Except, they had so little time together. Amado hated to waste it with some fucking diplomatic bullshit, as if every deal in this trade wasn’t made up of back-channel discussions and personal loyalties. As if it were wrong for Pacho to line a little something up for himself, after the Rodriguez brothers departed for a life of legally acquired yachts, investment banking, and sucking their own dicks. Motherfuckers.

Amado rested his elbows on his knees, holding his glass between both fingers and thumbs.

‘Thank you,’ Pacho said after a moment, ‘for the gift.’

‘To your taste, I hope?’

Pacho briefly closed his eyes like a happy cat. It was a move that could have been, might have been, calculated to make jealousy flare up in Amado. He had no right to be jealous. Hell, he’d picked the boy. And yet.

‘Perfect.’

Amado thought about the boy’s beautiful face, his smooth skin, his youth; compared him, unfavourably, to himself. And as he did so, Pacho tilted his head and watched him. Outside there were some insects making a jarring, rattling noise, but otherwise the house was very quiet. Amado could hear the sound of Pacho licking his lower lip and swallowing.

They were so close together that Amado's long legs bracketed Pacho's at the knee.

All at once it seemed obvious to Amado to lean in and press his mouth to Pacho's. He'd kissed Pacho before: on the cheek, casually, as a greeting. He'd been much closer to him than this. He’d held him, unapologetically, unironically, face buried in Pacho’s neck, _here you are, I missed you_. In public, where everyone could see, and yet nobody cared.

This was different.

Different, and although Pacho’s mouth was soft like any other mouth, kissing it made Amado’s breath stutter. _Mother of God._

Lost in the slow, lazy slide of Pacho’s tongue, Amado felt as though he were melting like warm wax. His blood was pressing and pooling in his body wherever the two of them touched: Amado’s mouth, his hands, the inside curve of his knees. All at once he realised that he had the fingers of his left hand circling Pacho’s wrist, and the thumb and forefinger of his right hand resting along Pacho’s jaw. He hastily relocated them to rest on Pacho’s legs, but that was worse, almost—too high up on his thighs.

No, it was better, because Pacho’s whole body leaned into Amado’s like a flower seeking sunlight, an unconscious, instinctual gesture. Amado dared to slide his mouth down Pacho’s throat, bare and golden in the half-light. Pacho sighed, one hand coming to the back of Amado’s neck. Christ. His fingernails on Amado’s scalp.

‘What’s it gonna take?’ Amado said into Pacho’s neck, frustrated, hopeful. Was he asking for Pacho tonight or in the nebulous, post-surrender future? Both? Yes. Both. His hands were aimlessly playing with the loose folds of Pacho’s shirt near his waist, moving of their own volition. To Amado’s tremulous surprise, Pacho’s breath caught.

‘Sex isn’t going to get you what you want, Amado.’

_What if sex _is_ what I want?_ Amado didn’t say. That would be fucking desperate. ‘How do you know that?’ he said instead, going for bravado. Hesitation was weakness, and weakness was death in this business, no matter how much you liked someone.

‘You think you’re the first person to try it?’

‘No,’ said Amado, suddenly sure, ‘but I’m the first person you wanted to try it.’

Pacho’s hands came to the backs of Amado’s elbows, so that he couldn’t have pulled away if he’d wanted to. Instead, Amado followed their pressure forward until he carried Pacho down onto the floor with him. Kissed him again, forcefully and then messily, and then they were pawing at each other, and Amado couldn’t see as far as the future. He was achingly hard against Pacho's thigh, and Pacho's fingers were working open the fly of his jeans. Amado couldn’t even see as far as tomorrow morning.

For once, he didn’t care.


End file.
